Mafia: Review of the old country

The cars ramble through dirt trucks in the Sicilian countryside. It’s a beautiful night or morning. I tracked it down, and I’m too busy reconfirming whether the pale sun is rising or retreating. How strange is it that something so new can feel so ancient (at least in the context in which it is presented). These ideas are the unrealistic and inefficient curiosity, Enzo Fabara, in a circle, but they are also about the mafia. It’s the old country itself.

If you get a relative or companion unfamiliar to the Mafia series to play the latest Hanger 13, you’re sure you’re just sampling a remaster of the 2000s game over the new release in 2025. It certainly hits me as I am becoming more and more desperate to convey their newness.

Old schools in the old country, and intentionally so. In response to criticism, Mafia 3 got when it came out about a decade ago, developers chose not to evolve the mafia game with a revised approach, but instead chose to oppose the inevitable onslaught of time.

Single-player stories are things, and open worlds are just the background for it to happen. Here, there are no tense online gavins or microtransactions in the series that are better or often worse. You need to link up your 2K account to access your car with the best stats of the game, but hey, we can’t have everything, right?

However, the result is that a very linear main plot has to do an overwhelming number of heavy lifting when making it feel worth the time of the game. It does a completely average job. I’ve been offered 10,000 times on YouTube over the past two weeks, down to the ad catchphrases for the game, but the old country is a chance to play classic movies. It’s a mob movie you’ve seen before, and its twist is blatantly choreographed or predictable, and its characters are pale imitations of deeper dons or more inspiring Sicilians.

The main character, Enzo, begins when he is sold to slavery in a sulphur mine run by the mafia. Now a young adult, he is desperate for nature to escape the dangerous tunnels beneath the literal volcano that is Mount Etna, except by his name. However, if he does, his freedom comes with the warning that he will be trapped in the service of another mob clan, the Torrisi family. This is a classic mafia film, and the young man soon falls in love with the family’s daughter, Isabella, and falls over his head.

Thus, the story told in chapters that take place over several years in the game begins, jumping for several months from major events to major events between each mission. There are trips to Palio, motor racing, baptism and opera. There will be no weddings or funerals unless you count what happens off-screen. This is at least one area where Hanger 13 feels like he has exercised a suppression of his desire to emulate a Godfather movie. As things progress at a fierce pace, some of the themes and plot points that distinguish the story of the old country, apart from the breathtaking inspiration, do not get the focus or exam they deserve.

Alienated Enzo will feel suddenly cast from a prison underground in the mine, in the dreamy Mediterranean vibrancy of the Dorata Valley, rubbing his shoulders with privilege. The tense relationship between Isabella and her dominant father, and the nature of what his position demands of a man. There was a great questioning that tolls trapped in criminal organizations would take families, and the disparity between poor workers and nouveau-rich landowners led the mafia to become such a powerful institution in places like clergy.

However, the game is too hopeless to slow down a bit on the next mechanically inconspicuous cover shooter, steal, drive, or ride. Part of this is the nature of what Hangar 13 was aiming for, and the old country is designed as a highly focused adventure in Bitseys. This means that while there is little bloating that plagues many open-world action games, the mafia media that the old country has a great deal of offering is only available small smidges of slices of life.

It paints nowhere, like a detailed picture of culture, a detailed picture of everyday life bound by a dark, powerful black hole that is “ours” just as the Godfathers and sopranos did. That constant rush will not drag the game, but it ensures that it doesn’t spend enough time doing one thing that best suits it. When you need a breather, you get a wonderful moment. Stop listening to guys on stage and tell local legends at Audible rescue. A car full of drunk idiots winds into town and blows tunes out of gravel, stopping so that one of them can piss off the side of the bridge as they scream for what they want with the local masses.

The open world itself is the lonely star of the show, clearly designed with attention and keen eyes to capture the beauty of fairy tale landscapes alternating between the calm and the sturdy. The problem is that in the desire to become old school and pretend to be Mafia 3, the developer left the squirrel so you can openly roam this lovely locale into another mode of exploration that is easy to miss from the gates. Certainly, keep in a sandbox filled with unnecessary amounts of map markers and meaningless ceté. However, it doesn’t seem like players need to back out and load completely different bits of the game, making them less likely to let them explore a bit.

On the one hand, I get it. By modern standards, the open world of the old country is rather static, with many interiors only accessible in their respective main story missions. There is also quite a bit of limited work to do in it, and aimless roaming is the only alternative to pick up a few collectible items that will help you embody the historical context of your settings or make more cash to spend on gear, vehicles, or limited customization options. On the other hand, it’s a shame that it’s more natural and we can’t get involved in it. Open worlds are not full of things, so you don’t have to be embarrassed about your open world, Mafia!

There are also some unstable performance issues with some crashes and regular studs, but most of this seemed to link straight to the transition between gameplay and cutscenes in the story mission. Ah, there was one point in Exploration mode when the texture of the cart was glitched across the map.

All this culminates in a paradoxical game that feels more like a 2006 release, which will be announced in 2025 than an actual re-release of the actual game this year from 2006.

I respect Hangar 13. They don’t feel they have to take part in today’s arms race of unprecedented open world/action stuff. But I think the way they implemented that vision is that their eyes glued too tightly to the rear view mirror. This is not a game that draws the best from how things were done at that point, but can create a middle ground where positive innovation can develop from that point and represent a better way. Older countries feel stuck in the past.